The first attempt at asphalt egg-frying did not go particularly well. PHOTO BY CAITLIN OSTROFF.
With the feels-like temperature reaching well over 100 degrees, the instinctive mental response was the expression “It’s so hot, you can fry an egg on the sidewalk.” And then we wondered, is it?
So we decided to test it.
EXPERIMENT #1
You’d think the longer the day, the more time the pavement would have to bake. Our first experiment we set for 4 p.m., thinking it would be hottest. Of course, Florida decided that was the opportune moment to rain. As Florida does.
With the then-cloudy weather, we sat our first egg on a piece of aluminum foil we left sitting in the sun all day. After 30 minutes of crouching in the Herald Tribune parking lot, the egg was just as soggy and uncooked as it had been in its shell.
EXPERIMENT #2
This time, we tried two different ways of cooking the egg: one on aluminum and one on asphalt.
Because asphalt is black, it absorbs more light and heat than sidewalk, usually white concrete, which reflects more light. Because of this, we expected the egg on the asphalt to cook faster (scientific method applied to real life).
In fact, Bill Nye the Science Guy tested egg-frying on a griddle and found the minimum temperature to cook an egg was 130 degrees Fahrenheit. His egg cooked in 20 minutes.
Ours did not.
We cooked our second two eggs at 2 p.m. at a real-feel temperature of 102 degrees.
The egg on the aluminum foil showed no changes until we moved it and found flakes of cooked egg white stuck to the foil after an hour. An hour. Who cooks an egg for an hour? Your friendly neighborhood dedicated Unravelers. That’s who.
For the egg on the asphalt, it took an hour for the yolk to start coagulating and parts of the egg white did start to cook.
So yes, it is indeed hot enough to cook an egg outside given enough time.
You know, if you were wondering, and wanted to try it. Though we hold no responsibility for weird looks from neighbors
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~Dahlia Ghabour and Caitlin Ostroff